The Persian Expedition (Anabasis, ca. 370-360 BCE)

XenophonTranslated by Rex Warner

London: Penguin Books, 1972; Pp. 375

Hardly anyone has not heard of the story of the Ten Thousands Greeks stranded
in hostile Persia after Cyrus' abortive attempt to overthrow his brother
Artaxerxes II. In the Spring of 401 B.C., Sparta rules Greece having defeated
the Athenian Empire in the Peloponnesian War. Among its most important
friends is Cyrus, who now becomes the benefactor of several thousand Greek
hoplites on mercenary pay, whom he takes on a long march deep into Persia.
However, his grandiose plans are thwarted when he is defeated in the Battle
at Cunaxa near Babylon in September of that year. The Ten Thousand, deprived
of their leaders, face imminent defeat at the hands of the King. It is then
that Xenophon the Athenian proposes a daring escape expedition. The army
elects its new leaders and braves fearsome tribes, the pursuing horsemen of
the King, a devastating winter, and impassable terrain to make its way out of
the land, a horrifying and engrossing ordeal that has captivated the
imagination of many a Greek imperialist (for it was thought to display the
rot in the state of Persia) and schoolboy (for it was undeniably a stunning
adventure). However overstated, Xenophon's participation was important if
only for the record (even if of dubious validity) he wrote of that
expedition.

The first part of Anabasis is taken with Cyrus' march from Sardis to Cunaxa.
Along the way, the Greeks mutiny when they discover that they have been
misled by the Persian, who had ostensibly hired them from a brief punitive
expedition. Their spirits are however uplifted with promise of booty, so they
decide to stick it out, much to their later regret. At Cunaxa, Cyrus is
killed and although the Greeks score some temporary success, it becomes
obvious that they are in desperate straits. The King's messenger arrives
demanding their submission, but as another Athenian rightly observes, "So
long as we keep our arms we fancy that we can make good use of our courage;
but if we surrender our arms we shall lose our lives as well." (p. 105) After
a truce with Tissaphrenes, the Greeks begin their withdrawal, as though they
are "in a friendly country," escorted by the Persians in mutual suspicion.

The suspicions quickly come to roost for neither side is able to commit to
upholding its side of the bargain. Indeed, the King did have a stake in
destroying these Greeks "so as to make the other Greeks afraid of marching"
against him (p. 117), and some soldiers urged a preemptive strike, which
itself was cause of alarm to the Persians. The dynamics of mutual alarm, as
Schelling would later call this, worked inexorably toward conflict. Solemn
pronouncements to the contrary notwithstanding, the situation could not be
alleviated by words alone, and, as frequently happens, people "become
frightened of each other and then, in their anxiety to strike first before
anything is done to them, have done irreparable harm to those who neither
intended nor even wanted to do them any harm at all" (p.123). It is worth
noting that even when both sides are well aware of this danger, the
incentives are such that such knowledge is not sufficient to forestall
disaster.

And disaster happens even though Tissaphrenes tells Clearchus that "if you
were to contemplate doing me an injury, you would be simultaneously plotting
against your own interests" (p. 125). When Clearchus takes the Greek generals
to plead his case against slander openly, a confusion occurs, and in what is
doubtless a miscarriage of justice, five of the generals are beheaded.

The rest of the book tells of the Ten Thousand trying to find their way out
of Persia. Leaderless, they elect (as good democrats) their new leaders, one
of whom is the young Xenophon, who is taken to delivering stirring speeches
and assigning to himself much of the credit for the Greeks' subsequent
success. Perhaps his most important speech is the one that laid bare the
foundations of Alexander's later conquests as it expounded the superiority of
Greek culture and spirit over the decadent Persians, portraying the latter as
inhabiting a decaying empire that was ripe for the taking by enterprizing
Greeks: "it is right and reasonable for us to make it our first endeavour to
reach our own folk in Greece and to demonstrate to the Greeks that their
poverty is of their own choosing, since they might see people who have a
wretched life in their own countries grow rich by coming out here" (p. 153).

The long march begins with Tissaphrenes in hot pursuit, the Greeks suffering
from slings and arrows. The army makes it out to Kurdistan, where they fight
the fierce Carduchi for every pass and every high hill, all the way through
the mountains up to the river Centrites, which they cross into Armenia. Then
the winter descends on them with all its cold and unforgiving fury. Soldiers
freeze to death, go hungry and exhausted, oblivious to lurking dangers from
natives and the deaf to the exhortations of their superiors. Even their guide
runs off into the night, leaving his own son captive despite the Greeks
expressly taking him hostage to prevent his father's escape. When hope is
almost gone, the Greeks finally catch sight of "The sea! The sea!" (p. 211).

The march through "friendly territory" is still quite exacting. The army
is assisted here and there by frightened colonists, "both because they are
afraid of us and because they want to get rid of us" (p. 223). The Greeks
engage in plundering expeditions, plan to found a piratical colony, assist
the local Mossynoeci get rid of a rival group, split into three, almost to
the ruin of all, when the Arcadians decide to go off for additional
plundering on their own, and then reunite only to run into trouble with the
Spartan governor of Byzantium when they reach the Bosphorus. They make a deal
with the Thracian king Seuthes and help him conquer some lands but in the end
are cheated of their pay, having lost their usefulness once their mission is
accomplished. Before leaving the army to Thibron the Spartan for his war
against Tissaphrenes, Xenophon remonstrates successfully with Seuthes about
that pay.

Some of the most astounding moments in Anabasis have to do with how the
Greeks behave. They are civilized enough to organize a vote for their
commanders, yet superstitious enough to fall to their knees when someone
sneezes, and to refuse to sally forth even though it is militarily prudent
while the omens tell them otherwise. The army, as any demos, is fickle,
unpredictable, and dangerous, even to its own benefactors. It is easy to sway
with rhetoric (the Spartans even initially contemplate putting Xenophon to
death on suspicion of him being a demagogue), it is easy to entice with the
promises of pay and plunder, and it is difficult to reason with, especially
when the lure of riches is nearby, as the stoning of the ambassadors from
Cerasus demonstrates.

Yet other things are also quite interesting. Xenophon describes many battles,
but not much in the way of tactics. Still, he justifies putting his own
troops in a position from which it would be impossible to escape once the
battle begins: "I should like the enemy to think it easy going in every
direction for him to retreat; but we ought to learn from the very position in
which we are placed that there is no safety for us except in victory" (pp.
286-7), a shrewd way to give up initiative and leave the enemy the choice of
fighting to the death or escaping. He also frequently appels to reputation,
as in his talk to Seuthes, where he argues that reneging on the promise to
pay would be detrimental to the king's future because it would ruin his
reputation (although he also buttresses the argument with the threat that the
king would have to fight six thousand disgruntled Greeks in addition to his
subjects who are only kept at bay by the fear of the mercenaries).

As an adventure, Anabasis is exciting, although one wishes to hear more about
the tribes that the Greeks meet on their way. As it is, they are no more than
shadowy people who take to the mountains, defend their homes, harass the
Greeks, or attempt to bribe them. But they are all treated gloriously as
barbarians despite the predations of the "civilized" Hellenes.